Dilara Fındıkoğlu Is Ready for Revolution
For the Turkish designer, femininity and sensuality are as sharp as knife blades—and as effective too.
Have you ever felt that every part of yourself was under siege? Your hair. Your heart. Your family. Your femininity.
This is what it is like to be a woman in a world run by men. Some days can pass innocently enough. Others may begin benignly, but end in trauma. Every woman knows both kinds of days.
Dilara Fındıkoğlu won’t accept this reality. Her Fall 2023 collection, presented in London, is “my little dance of revolution to actually processing your body back,” she says backstage. Titled “Not a Man’s Territory,” the collection is a call to arms for women wronged to speak in their own language and claim what is rightfully theirs: themselves.
It began, Fındıkoğlu says, with the protests in Iran over the murder of Mahsa Amini for showing her hair publicly. To date, hundreds have been killed by security forces and others publicly executed for participating in the protests. “I’m so inspired by how they were cutting their hair off in the streets,” Fındıkoğlu says. “It was so powerful.” So she took hair and made it into bralette tops and bustiers, braided to curve around the bosom and pinch in at the tender-bellied waist. “They’re wearing their hair how they want to wear it,” she affirms.
Elsewhere a model walked covered in a black shawl, which she stripped off to reveal a skimpy two piece underneath. Another model took off her butter-yellow mohair skirt mid catwalk too, an act of protest Fındıkoğlu says was a reaction to the objectification of Marilyn Monroe. “I watched that movie,” she says, referring to Blonde, the maligned, Oscar-nominated 2022 release. “I hated it.” Once again, someone plastered their own narrative onto a woman they didn’t know.Not here. These women are in charge of their own destinies under the guidance of patron saint Dilara. She has blessed each with a name. The Victorian lace bustier dress with corseted gloves that prison the model’s arms behind her back: Innocent Bondage. A mesh shirt with tendrils of hair over the breasts worn with a peeling-off skirt: Freedom. Red sheer hoods and a miniskirt: National Heroine. Layers of vintage beads and antique fabrics, with ivory ruffles trailing like a corpse bride’s veil: Whore Star of Heaven. The wiggle black dress covered in antique cutlery: Joan’s Knives.
Fındıkoğlu launches into Joan of Arc. “If she wears sexy stuff, she is a prostitute, but if she wears boyish clothing, then she is burnt,” she says. “So she’s taken back her body. She’s coming back for revenge.”It might not seem like much to reempower women on a fashion show runway, but in the past decade, catwalks have become as viable a place to work out societal issues as the gallery, the theater, the cinema, or the Oscars. And so here comes Paz de la Huerta as the Typical Flower in a skin-colored bodice made of resin-dipped flowers. “There’s a song by The Slits called ‘Typical Girls.’ We’re not typical girls. I’m not a typical girl—and what is a typical girl anyway? I don’t know what that means,” Fındıkoğlu scoffs. “I wanted to write ‘Typical Flower’ because I feel like even in the Victorian times they wanted to see us as objects, as virgins, as a flower. And this is not that. She’s not your typical flower.”De la Huerta stepped into the sacrum of the chapel that housed the show and blossomed. The actress is still litigating against Harvey Weinstein, who she claims raped her on two occassions, in Californian courts. She is one of more than six dozen women to allege abuse from the producer, and her career was curtailed at the hands of a powerful man. Her story might be typical, but her self—and what was taken from it—is not.
On top of the deep sorrow laced into Fındıkoğlu’s corsets there was another pain. Weeks before her show, her native country, Turkey, and its neighbor, Syria, experienced an earthquake that left over 40,000 people dead. She wrote a statement before the show that was posted to Instagram, encouraging her guests to donate to help the victims of the natural disaster.On the day of the Pisces full moon, backstage, Fındıkoğlu is wearing vintage Victorian petticoats layered under her leather jacket. Models are being cupped into garments made from collected feathers, deadstock mohairs, and vintage fabrics. Adina Fohlin stands on a stage with attendants lacing her up into a black feathered dress. Sibyl Buck is in the hallway, contorting her neck in practice for her vixenish runway turn. Fındıkoğlu is in front of a board of looks, surveilling the scene, and briefly breaks character. “I don’t know how I’m going to post these pictures,” she says quietly, after we speak, reflecting on the devastation of her homeland. “I just have to go on, right?”
Minutes later, when she comes out to take her bow to echoing applause, she wears sunglasses and smiles with brazen certitude.“Is that a logo on the lace?” I ask, referring to a tiny flock on some tights.“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” she shakes her head. “I’m not about that. We are more punks.” Even though her deconstructed and upcycled clothing is so viscerally her own, so rock and romanticism, so viciously Victorian vixen, she won’t brand it as hers. This one’s for all of us.
